Categories
ranting

Spiders have kinkier sex lifes than your college roommate

Darwin’s bark [spiders](Caerostris darwini) … have a rich sexual repertoire that includes oral sexual contact. The males routinely salivate onto female genitalia before, during, and after copulation.

Janet Fang from Male Spiders Perform Oral Sex On Females [iflscience.com]

Actually, spiders as a whole are the Marques de Sade (is there a female version I should use here?) of the animal world, as the opening sentence of the article makes clear:

The females of many spider species have evolved giant sizes, and they’re known for extreme sexual behaviors – ranging from mate binding and plugging to sexual cannibalism, genital mutilation, and emasculation.

Janet Fang from Male Spiders Perform Oral Sex On Females [iflscience.com]

I nominate this for the best science sentence of the year. This is NC17 Discovery Channel shit.

Note the authors name for extra credit.

Categories
ranting

Not the big cheese

False advertising:

Small cheese; big box
Categories
photography

Cherry Blossom at Gardens by the Bay

IMG_7128

See the full Cherry Blossoms at Gardens by the Bay photoset on Flickr [flickr.com].

Categories
quotes

Who Controls The Nukes?

Nuclear weapons are inherently dangerous. Handling them, using them, not using them, requires caution, care. Living as we do now with North Korea, Pakistani generals, jihadists, and who knows who’ll be the next U.S. president, the world is very, very lucky that at one critical moment, someone calm enough, careful enough, and cool enough was there to say no.

Robert Krulwich in You (and Almost Everyone You Know) Owe Your Life to this Man [phenomena.nationalgeographic.com]

That’s as close as National Geography gets to calling Trump insane.

Categories
quotes technical

Why Public Cloud

The fact is that cloud service providers (CSPs) at any kind of scale have more network engineers, security engineers, compliance experts, and operational personnel than most companies that run their own data centers. 

John Purrier quoted in The Roles Cloud and DevOps Should play in Your Digital Transformation [enterprisersproject.com] on The Enterprisers Project

This will be the single biggest driver in moving to the cloud in the future. Even large enterprises have proved how bad they are at security —looking at you Sony! The big cloud players will be the ones who can bring these services at the most capable, most professional and most cost effective level to all companies from startups to mega multinationals. Why should every company have its own IT Security team?